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Wow last weekend was very busy and this week hasn't been much quieter which is why its taken me so long to write up this blog - sorry!

Last Saturday morning we held a coffee morning and cake sale at Wellington Methodist Church to raise some money towards our next flip flop order. We were really excited to see so many people arriving during the morning and we had to send one of our helpers out TWICE to get more bacon, sausages and baps to keep the kitchen stocked! The coffee morning raised nearly £100 for us which is just fantastic and will go a long way.

Then at 11pm on Saturday evening a team of our amazing volunteers arrived at the Church again to set up for our night on the streets. We had a quick team briefing and a cup of tea and then headed out in pairs towards Pussycats and Telford Arena to see how the night was going.

The Telford Arena was hosting a special tribute night in honour of Georgia Williams to raise money for the Georgia Williams Trust and they had a large crowd of over 16's and over 18's enjoying the night. Pussycats was also very busy and there were still large numbers of people heading into the club up till around 1.30am.

Our night got off to a quick start and by 1am we had two young women in our café requiring first aid treatment. One of the young women was very unwell and her friend was very concerned as they hadn't been out for long and neither of them had had a lot to drink and had only been drinking their normal drinks. One of our volunteers (a qualified paramedic) checked her over and from her symptoms he believed her drink had been spiked. We made arrangements to get her to the hospital to be fully assessed and her friend contacted her Mum to let her know what was happening. The two young women were sent off to the PRH with our prayers for a swift recovery. I am sure that the young woman is very grateful for having such a good friend who realised immediately that something was wrong and brought her straight to us.

Back outside Pussycats our volunteers came face to face with a man who had been thrown out of the nightclub. He was very agitated and aggressive and when our volunteers tried to talk to him we got no response at all. He was completely vacant and pacing around like a caged animal. We made a few attempts to talk to him but he completely ignored us every time and continued to pace backwards and forwards. Later on in the evening another young man accidentally bumped into him as he was pacing and we were very worried that a fight might erupt but the man didn't even seem to notice. He was outside the nightclub for almost 2 hours before a friend of his left the club. They had a conversation and then headed off to the taxi queue when seconds later we heard a loud thump as the man punched his friend full in the face and then walked off leaving his friend on the ground. His friend got up and got into a taxi leaving the man pacing around outside the club. He didn't leave the area until nearly 4am when the nightclub had closed.

During the night several other young men were ejected from the nightclub for having caused trouble inside. We chatted with a few of them and gave out lollipops and one of them apologised for having been aggressive and said he knew he was at fault. One of our volunteers had a really good chat with him and then before he left he went and apologised to the nightclub security staff and said he would make contact with his Doctor to seek help.

Another one of the young men who was ejected from the nightclub spent a good deal of time hurling verbal abuse back through the gates of the club at a young woman. Again lollipops seemed to calm the situation but a short while later he was back to being aggressive again and our volunteers had to make the decision to simply stay away from him until he calmed down. Later on we offered him help to get home but he refused and walked away from the area.

As the music stopped inside Pussycats a large crowd of nearly 100 people suddenly emerged outside the gates. There was a huge queue of taxi's in the rank but the taxi marshalls had already left so our volunteers became impromtu taxi marshalls and tried to direct people to the right taxi's. The only problem was that all of the taxi's that were in the queue were booked for nightclub staff and the taxis to collect the clubbers were much further down the road and around the corner which made it very difficult to shout out names and our volunteers were having to run up and down the car park to get people.

Eventually we decided to call it a night and headed back into the Church to pack away.

But our weekend didn't end there!

Just a few short hours later some of our volunteers were at the Bowring Park in Wellington setting up a display at the Lions Fun Day. We spent the whole day enjoying the sun and telling people about our project and the fun we get up to. We really hope that some of the people we spoke to will come forward to volunteer for us.

Thanks for reading our blog. Please share our posts with your friends as we really do need more volunteers to help us in Wellington so if you know anyone who might be interested in helping just once a month then please tell them about us!

Deborah x

Here's a photo of the display we created at the Lions Day in the Bowring Park.